Conference: Soseki's Diversity

For three days in April, scholars from three continents will gather at the University of Michigan to reflect on the legacy of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), Japan's most widely read and intensively studied modern novelist. Soseki's works are fixtures on the syllabi of high school literature courses in Japan and the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of scholarly articles. His place in the Japanese national imagination is comparable to that of a figure like Mark Twain in the United States. Until recently, his portrait appeared on the ¥1000 bill.

Soseki’s fourteen novels, written in just over a decade from 1905 to 1916, exhibit an astonishing stylistic diversity and formal inventiveness: from exuberantly comic satire to a realism marked by unsparing irony and precise psychological observation. Taken together, they constitute a fictional account of unparalleled richness of the daily lives of Tokyo’s middle classes as they lived through Japan’s dizzyingly rapid emergence as a modern industrial society.

In addition to his work as a novelist, Soseki was also a gifted poet, writing in both Japanese and Chinese. He was the founder of English literary studies in Japan, and the author of the monumental Theory of Literature (1905), one of the world’s earliest attempts to describe scientifically how literature works.

With the centenary of his death approaching and the recent release by major presses of a number of new English translations of his novels, Soseki’s work is poised to attract new readers worldwide and new levels of scholarly attention. “Soseki’s Diversity” will build on this momentum, its final day falling on the 100th anniversary of the inaugural newspaper installment of his novel Kokoro, perhaps the most canonical work in all of modern Japanese literature. In nine panels over three days, and featuring keynotes by John Nathan and Tawada Yoko, the conference will add new voices to a century of scholarship on Soseki, reflecting on his place in modern Japanese literature and in world literature more broadly.